With the solo exhibition “near and far” the artist Dieter Mammel gives a comprehensive insight into his personal impressions and experiences in interaction with the political events of our time. Escape, search, journey and location of the human being and the associated longing for arrival and acceptance are facing a loud, blind rage of self-aggrandizement and self-staging. Mammel sensitively commutes between those possible
states of being, grasps the subtle emotional differences and similarities of excesses and thus provides a profound image of his, our world. In the well-known monochromy of his tinged paintings, the portrayed characters appear against the wind and the weather, hurry and dwell surrounded by water and forest, look into the distance with their eyes wide open and search for knowledge.

Dieter Mammel’s watercolors have always lived from the tension between the painted and unpainted canvas, between light and shadow – but now, color closes the interstices between the picture and the pictorial space. Black ink and yellow acrylic paint flow together on the wet canvas, turning green in some places, in others glowing from the contrast. Humans and animals as well seem to react viscerally to this: they laugh and walk towards the yellow, entering into it, or they stand there, hypnotized by it. They start to glow within the color as much as the painting itself, or they create the glowing color through light and smoke. All of this happens “in-between,” in a kind of “twilight,” between luminescence and flames, laughter and tears, between life and death. Pictures, telling about life.